


burn the body down

by spellingmynamewrong



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Eating Disorders, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-09
Updated: 2020-08-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:13:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25807168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spellingmynamewrong/pseuds/spellingmynamewrong
Summary: He sees the way Remus looks at him now, touches him too gingerly, and he can almost hear the words Remus is thinking, echoing out of his brain,relapse, relapse, relapse,but it’s fine, really.Remus was always going to leave him.
Relationships: Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Comments: 14
Kudos: 150





	burn the body down

**Author's Note:**

> the title is taken from “diagnosis” by cynthia cruz. obvious tw for explicit mentions of an eating disorder.

Remus is going to leave him soon, and it will be his fault.

He sees the way Remus looks at him now, touches him too gingerly, and he can almost hear the words Remus is thinking, echoing out of his brain,  _ relapse, relapse, relapse,  _ but it’s fine, really. 

Remus was always going to leave him. 

* * *

Dinner, and Sirius does the old song-and-dance, cuts up the chicken until it looks like too little and too much at once, mushes up the carrots and smiles sharply at Remus, daring him to say anything at all. It’s not like it actually helps anymore, not with restriction, at least, but it makes Remus angry, and lately, Sirius thinks that infuriating Remus is better than Remus not feeling anything towards Sirius, hatred or love. 

He thinks of Cassie from  _ Skins  _ and wonders if E4 knew what they were doing when they made her, knew that her mere existence would spur on the eating disorders of girls across the nation. Probably not. Capitalism doesn’t give a shit about who it hurts, but it also doesn’t care enough to even know that it will hurt anyone at all. 

_ I didn’t eat for three days so I could be lovely,  _ he thinks mockingly, and when he starts laughing Remus just looks at him with sad eyes, like he knows exactly what Sirius is thinking. He probably does.

* * *

Twenty-five is too old to still have an eating disorder. He wonders why all those ED novels stop when their protagonists—always female, always white, always heterosexual, usually dancers—turn eighteen. Maybe he’ll take up writing sometime, write a book about a sad man in his mid-twenties who still weighs out food by the ounces and pretends that stevia tastes exactly the same as real sugar and has a wonderful, kind boyfriend who will leave him.

Though there probably isn’t much of a market for that book. It makes sense—everyone wants to read about a tragedy, so long as it doesn’t feel real enough to be a tragedy that could actually happen to them.

* * *

Maybe things could have been different if his parents had cared more. If his parents had believed in the concept of therapy instead of dismissing him the first (and only) time he scrounged up the courage to tell his parents that sometimes he skipped meals and liked it, if his mother hadn’t told him that it was good for a boy his age to start caring about fitness, if his brother hadn’t been so fully convinced that Sirius couldn’t have an eating disorder because he wasn’t a girl.

Or maybe they wouldn’t. He knows Marlene, after all, and Marlene is everything Sirius is not—blonde and female and beautiful and thin and a dancer, with a family that loves her more than life itself—and she still calls Sirius, sobbing, when she’s walked ten thousand steps in her flat, pacing round and round because she needs to burn the calories from her latest binge. 

* * *

He knows that once, he was beautiful too. He sees the pictures of himself, sixteen and beaming, and he wonders where it all went wrong.

Maybe things had always been wrong, and he just didn’t know it. But—

Sixteen-year-old him is beautiful. He has long, dark hair and gleaming eyes, and his smile is charming. He can see how Remus fell in love with him. 

* * *

“You know who I want to look like?”

Remus looks at him and smiles. “Who?” Remus always humors him like this, even though he shouldn’t. It only ever hurts Remus in the end.

“Timothee Chalamet,” he says, and he can see the moment Remus’s eyes light up, thinking that maybe Sirius is getting better, that he’s going to recover, this time, finally. 

“Why?”

He hesitates. He knows what he wants to say—some dark joke about the hollowness of his cheeks, probably. But Remus looks beautiful when he smiles. “The fame and glory, you know? If I looked like him, everyone would fall in love with me. I’d be a billionaire.”

“Everyone already is in love with you,” Remus says softly. 

Sirius doesn’t know when Remus got so good at lying.

* * *

Remus has a new friend. Her name is Tonks, and she has bright pink hair and a laugh like bells and is beautifully model-thin. 

Sirius wants to hate her, but he can’t.

She met Remus at Tesco, she explains. They reached for the same tube of Pringles, only Tonks is so clumsy, and she managed to knock over more than twenty tubes at once, and Remus helped her out, and then they got to talking, and now they’re friends, isn’t it wonderful? 

Sirius looks at her, sitting at his kitchen table, dressed in too-baggy ripped jeans and an old t-shirt. She looks at Remus like he’s the moon and the stars, and Sirius thinks that if Remus has to leave him for anyone, which he will, it would hurt a bit less if it were her.

He agrees that it’s wonderful and listens to her Tinker Bell laugh and wonders if she’s ever stuck her fingers down her throat.

* * *

Movie night, and they’re watching  _ The Social Network.  _ He’s on his phone, scrolling through Reddit, because he knows Remus hates it. 

Remus looks down at him with those sad brown eyes again, and it hurts so much that he finally shuts off his phone. 

On screen, Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg (distinguished from Actual Mark Zuckerberg by his ability to project more than two emotions) tells Andrew Garfield as Eduardo Saverin that he needs to come out to Palo Alto. 

“Someone wrote a fanfiction about Eduardo having an eating disorder,” Sirius says, because even if he doesn’t want to make Remus sad, he’s never said he wasn’t a bad person.

“Oh?” It looks like Remus will indulge him tonight, so Sirius continues.

“He had bulimia, I think. The author wrote something about Eduardo needing control.” He glances up at Remus, who’s carding his hands through Sirius’s hair. It’s too intimate, too loving a gesture for someone like Sirius. “There’s actually a bunch of those fanfictions. It’s always Eduardo with the eating disorder, which I don’t understand. If anything, it should be Mark. Like, canonically, they say he forgets to eat, which is just  _ such  _ bullshit, you know?”

“I know,” Remus says, and Sirius has to blink back tears because Remus  _ does  _ know, doesn’t he.

* * *

Remus is packing up his bags, and Sirius leans on the doorway.

He knew this day would come. He just didn’t know it would be so soon.

“I’m sorry,” he manages to croak out. He wonders what life will be like without Remus—does he even know how to live life without Remus? He can’t stay over at James and Lily’s all day, especially not now that Harry is old enough to notice things, things like their parents’ friend not being able to eat real bread without wanting to scream, and Peter and Mary are engaged now, and they wouldn’t want Sirius intruding. He imagines life alone, in the apartment, wasting away slowly. He always knew it would come to this, though. There’s no other way for this to end.

“What?” Remus looks up at him. He looks—confused, almost, which makes no sense at all. “What are you sorry for?”

“Everything,” he says. “I’m sorry that—I’m sorry that I’m making you leave.” There’s a lump in his throat now, and he won’t let Remus see him cry, he can’t, because if he cries Remus will comfort him and Remus will stay and he can’t force Remus to stay, not again.

“Why do you think I’m leaving?” Remus isn’t holding any bags anymore, and he’s walking closer to Sirius, and he’s leading Sirius onto the couch. “What gave you that idea?”

“Why wouldn’t you leave? I’m absolutely terrible to you,” he says, half-laughing. “God, I’m terrible to you.”

“Sirius.” Remus has his arms around Sirius’s waist now, and Sirius doesn’t deserve any of this. “I’m not leaving you.”

“Why not? All I do is—all I do is make you angry on purpose, and I pick fights, and I’m trying to make you leave, Remus, because I’m not good for you. And if you’re not leaving, why do you have all these bags?”

“I have a business trip, remember?” And oh, he can remember something like that now, the haze of a conversation he half-listened to while he stared into the distance and wondered if it was possible to delude yourself into having an eating disorder.

“I’m sorry,” he manages to say, and now he  _ is  _ crying, and he hates this, hates all of this with every fiber of his bones. “Fuck, I’m sorry.”

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” Remus says firmly. “Sirius, I  _ love  _ you. I’ve loved you for the better part of a decade, and we’re going to get through this.”

“How do you know that?”

“We always have before, haven’t we?” Remus takes Sirius’s hand in his own, squeezes it softly, like a pulse, the beat of an unseen dance. 

“I’m twenty-five,” Sirius says bitterly. “If I’m going to actually recover, I should have done it already.”

“I don’t think you can pin an age to this,” Remus says. “I’ll be here, no matter how long it takes.”

“You shouldn’t have to be.”

“I want to be.”

* * *

Remus doesn’t leave him.

Sirius doesn’t recover in a week, but he’s not living in a movie.

A few months later, he manages to eat his first piece of bread in a year without wanting to vomit.

Life goes on. 

**Author's Note:**

> if you are suffering from an eating disorder in the usa, contact the national eating disorders association helpline at 1-800-931-2237.


End file.
